High-Tech Manufacturing is a Complex Business
High technology products often involve highly complex assemblies of hundreds, or even thousands of components. Many components have options to tailor products to unique customer specifications, such as hardware, software, storage, database, networking, and other attributes. As a result of the many components and many possible options for each component, high technology products can often be configured in millions, and perhaps trillions of different ways! This level of complexity needs an advanced configuration software, such as the Selectica Simplexity Configurator™.

Customers are Demanding More
As customers’ own businesses become more complex, they require products that are uniquely tailored to their own needs. That means that you need a solution that validates the customer configuration to ensure that all of the various component constraints are met right the first time. Some of the world’s largest high technology manufacturing companies employ the Selectica Simplexity Configurator™ for exactly this reason—to give customers what they want.

Competitive Advantage through Differentiation
Often, just meeting customers’ needs is not enough. Businesses must be proactive in differentiating their products to set themselves apart from the herd. By demonstrating to customers that you can configure products that are unique and highly relevant to customers, you can quickly show competitive advantage over slower, “one size fits all” vendors. The Selectica Simplexity Configurator™ can be your ticket to competitive advantage through differentiation.

Responding to Rapid Changes in Customer Requirements and Technology
Speed is the name of the game. Once a new product variant or technology is introduced at your company, you must get it out to the marketplace as quickly as possible or lose your advantage. Manually update product configurations to get your new product out to market can take weeks, or sometimes even months. New advanced solutions such as the Selectica Simplexity Configurator™ can reduce this process to only days, or sometimes even hours.

Increase Sales through Channel Partners
Channel partners will not sell your product unless you make it easy for them to do so. Spreadsheet or paper-based configuration “solutions” that can not properly configure solutions cause many problems for your channel. First, channel members run the risk of configuring the order incorrectly, likely resulting in an unhappy customer and decreased profits. Second, field sales people will not take advantage of all the potential variants of the product, letting the competition steal away your customer by giving them what they really want. And third, channel sales people are fickle; they will not go out of their way to sell something if it creates a lot of extra work to do so. Sophisticated configurators, like the Selectica Simplexity Configurator™ mask the complexity, allowing channel sales people to quickly configure a solution that give the customer exactly what they want, the first time, and every time.

Avoiding Miscommunications Between Manufacturing and Sales
Most configuration solutions are specialized for front-end sales configurations, as in a web-based e-commerce platform, or back-end manufacturing configurations, such as translating a bill of materials (BOM) to a finished product. When companies use two different configurators for front end and back end processes, miscommunications are bound to result. What the customer ordered through the front end configurator can be different than what was manufactured through the back end configurator, because the configurators are different. They might use slightly different nomenclature, slightly different product models, or otherwise not be an exact replica of each other. The Selectica Simplexity Configurator™ solves this dilemma in the most elegant way—by being able to accommodate both the demands of the front end and the back end configuration processes.

If you would like to learn more about Selectica and/or see a demonstration of Selectica’s configuration and pricing software solution for high-tech manufacturing companies, please contact one of our configuration and pricing experts by clicking  here.